September 23, 2013 — This August marked the 10th anniversary of the first production use of TeraMedica’s Evercore vendor neutral archive software.

A decade ago no one had heard of a ‘vendor neutral archive.’ As a pioneer in clinical content management, TeraMedica was originally founded out of the Mayo Clinic in 2001. In just two years, on Aug. 14, 2003, the archive was in use at Mayo.

As a forerunner in medical innovation, Mayo Clinic sought a solution to their ever-growing clinical imaging interoperability needs and built the VNA software solution. The original system was awarded a number of patents by the United States Patent Office. Today, it houses approximately 2 billion digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) images at Mayo, as well as nearly 400,000 non-DICOM objects. Mayo Clinic was a startup investor of this solution and still owns a portion of TeraMedica, currently retaining observer rights on the company’s board of directors.

Jim Prekop, TeraMedica CEO, said, “Major healthcare systems require seamless access to patient images across all access points because of their diversity of clinical services and technologies, and often multiple locations. TeraMedica’s ability to meet this demand, combined with opportunities for patient analytics enabled by enterprise architecture, makes our VNA extremely appealing to large hospital environments.”

Added Prekop, “We appreciate our long-standing relationship with Mayo Clinic. Medical centers nationally have followed Mayo’s lead and are recognizing the benefits of a vendor neutral archive solution. Leading institutions are eager to integrate their electronic medical records, achieve Meaningful Use Stage II, as well as deploy successful health information exchanges (HIE).”